Lavender avenger.

Hate Crime

* Starring Seth Peterson . Written and directed by Tommy Stovall

* Pasidg Productions

Hate Crime is one of those gay indies that wears its good intentions on its sleeve and plays like a queer Lifetime movie--for the first half, anyway. Then it makes a loony detour into Death Wish territory and gets a lot more entertaining, even if plausibility gets some what strained. A Dallas gay couple (Seth Peterson and Brian J. Smith) live the perfect suburban guppie dream until a twitchy, buttoned-up homophobe Bible-thumper (Chad Donella) moves in next door. (And when I say buttoned-up, I mean that literally--every shirt he owns gets fastened all the way up to his Adam's apple.) Then one of the gays gets brutally murdered--while walking their adorable little dog, natch--and the widower feels compelled to take the law into his own hands.

Seasoned viewers will guess who's going to be murdered and what the evangelist's shameful secret is, and the movie is anything but subtle: There's a liberal church versus fire-and-brimstone church montage that should be shown in film schools as a how-not-to. But writer-director Stovall at least tosses in enough potential suspects to keep the denouement something of a surprise. And it's also a pleasure to see vets like Cindy Pickett and Susan Blakely back on the big screen. Hate Crime won't change the world, but it's the kind of movie that will suck you in on a Sunday afternoon when you have the flu and you're watching Logo.